read other language strings and display

Hi all,
I am using Visual Studio 2005, i am new to MFC and i am trying to write a simple program to read a string (of french or chineese or any other language) from a file and display it on AfxMessageBox()
How can i do this..what all i need to know in this context
what are the functions available to encode or decode a string to UTF16 ??

What exactly i am looking for is language: in English when converted to French becomes ----langue:
and i know langue: is stored in file and i want to read and display in AfxMessageBox() how can i do this ??? and

say i know the UTF-16 encoded value of langue: is stored in a file in hex.. and now i want to read that hex value and decode that as langue: how can i do this ??

Please give me some basic idea how all these encoding and decoding to UTF-16 is done and how to read write a UTF-16 encoded string....